Bay Area artist Mitchell Johnson is exhibiting 35 paintings at 229 Hamilton Avenue in Palo Alto, California, a 3,000-square-foot gallery space formerly occupied by Pace Palo Alto. The gallery is open daily from 12 to 6pm (PT) through Thursday, August 3.
Palo Alto has played a significant role in Johnson’s life and career. He moved there from NYC to work for Sam Francis and has since had numerous exhibitions in the city, but never a show of this scale. This exhibition, It Takes Time, includes 15 large paintings Johnson focused on from 2019 to 2023. It is an eclectic show featuring icebergs, boats, lifeguard stands, and views of San Francisco, New England, and New York. The common thread is color concerns; Johnson frequently works on paintings for months, if not years, carefully tuning and adjusting color relationships with the aim of achieving unique and unexpected commentary on our day-to-day surroundings. A selection of earlier small paintings is included to contextualize his 40-year career.
Mitchell Johnson moved to Palo Alto, California, in 1990 shortly after finishing his MFA at Parsons School of Design in New York City. He spent the 1990s peregrinating between California, New York, and Europe as he created brushy landscapes and figure paintings. In the 2000s, repeated trips to the Danish island of Bornholm and a chance viewing of a Josef Albers/Giorgio Morandi exhibition in Bologna led to a decisive change in approach. Johnson turned towards a more consciously organized picture plane, where larger shapes are intended to serve as scaffolding for commentary on the tension between manmade and naturally occurring color. Land and clouds became clusters of rooftops and cottages carefully observed, but also carefully arranged. Quilts of Tuscan fields became water towers, picnic tables, and chairs.
Johnson’s apparent receptiveness to the paintings’ own demands was noted by the writer Chris Busa in a 2012 Provincetown Arts article:
If many of Johnson’s paintings are titled after the places that inspired them, no such places actually exist. Each one is a collage of compressed intimacies spread out over the months it takes to paint them. He has done what Edwin Dickinson called “Premier Coup”, in which a painting is completed outdoors in one blow. Yet his typical practice is to hold a painting for several months, or more, in the studio, to see if a painting stands the test of repeated looking, often involving the process of memory revision, where a succession of impressions gained over weeks or months is expressed as continuous flow.
Donald Kuspit recently wrote:
Like all of Johnson’s works, a latent conflict is built into the scene, in the form of often abrupt contrasts of space and form. Strange as it may seem to say so, they are implicitly psychodramas disguised as physical drama. I am arguing that they have an emotional cutting edge, making them more than matter-of-factly descriptive and ingeniously abstract.
Mitchell Johnson’s work is also included in Springs Eternal, a group exhibition curated by Alexander DiJulio at the Fireplace Project in East Hampton, New York, from July 22 through August 11.
For more information, visit mitchelljohnson.com and follow him on Instagram at @mitchell_johnson_artist.
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